How To Create A Great Social Media Report
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Social Performance Measurement For Agencies

How To Create A Great Social Media Report And Communicate Results To The Management

Tina Ahmed posted on 25 February 2015

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It is widely agreed that tracking and analysing results play a major part of a successful social media campaign. As a social media marketer you should be reviewing your activities daily, identifying valuable insights and taking action to improve your performance. One aspect many forget is that it is also vital to communicate your achievements to the management and the rest of the company, in order to underline the importance of the social media team. Here is how you can create a monthly social media report to communicate your results to the management.

Why internal reporting is important

As a social media team within a larger business, it is critical to keep the executives informed about your activities. Social media is still a relatively new field, it might be a big marketing buzz word, but most of the senior management are still new to social media and don’t have much experience with it. Part of your job is to educate them in what social media is, enhance the visibility of your activities within the company, and persuade them that it is worth the investment of time and resources.

Reporting

Explain to them why you are doing what you are doing, what results you have achieved and show the potential of social media to deliver a real financial return. It will help consolidate your position in the company, ensure you get more freedom and responsibility, and may even win the social media team a greater allocation of company resources. If you are already the owner of a social media budget, sending a monthly report will help you justify the investment the company is making, and hopefully ensure the continuation and expansion of that commitment.

The same applies if you are an agency or a consultant working with clients. You do want to communicate your activities and results achieved, and a monthly report is the perfect tool for this.

3 things to do before sending a social media report

You do not want to just send a report out of the blue to randomly selected individuals. Instead you should arrange a quick chat with the most relevant manager or senior executive to discuss this. These are the things you should agree:

The content of the report. What metrics are important to the management? How will success be measured? There are so many different metrics you can analyse in social media so unless you prioritise what you include in your report, it could be very lengthy. You want to agree on the most important metrics you should be monitoring and reporting on. Metrics that make sense and are tied with the broader business goals. The list of people the report should be sent to. Should the report be sent to the senior executives only? What about the managers from other teams such as online marketing, customer support and the SEO team?

How often should the report be sent. Some executives might like to see weekly reports, but for most a monthly report is ideal. In this discussion you may discover that all the more established teams already send reports covering their own activities which can affirm your intention to do the same.

Reporting Options

7 key entries to include in your month-end report

You will be able to get the expectations, the success criteria and the business goals directly from the executives. These will lead you to the metrics to track and include in the report. For many companies the metrics below will cover most of the basic needs.

  • Page growth / audience size. It’s important to show the size and the growth of the page. Most executives still see the number of page likes as the most important number so do include this.
  • Content reach. This number shows the impact of the content in terms of people reached. It is a useful metric that shows the value of your page beyond the total number of likes.
  • Engagement. This number shows how great and relevant the content you post actually is. You might want to highlight a specific post or two that you are especially proud of.
  • Your activity. Include the number of posts published in the month and original content created to show the activity of the team.
  • Spell out the success stories. Executives are busy and they most probably will only quickly scan reports they get. This is why you should include an executive summary with 3-5 bullet points of top achievements from the month.
  • Include insights and lessons learned. In social media you are in direct touch with the customers of the company. Most other teams do not have this benefit. Are there some social media insights you can share that can help other teams too? Such as things people complain about or product features people request the most?
  • Preview the upcoming month. End the report by mentioning what you are planning to do next month. Explain what you learnt from the previous month that you plan to implement in the upcoming weeks and how it all fits within the broader marketing campaigns the company is running.
Metrics

How Locowise helps you report better

Some years back when I first started running social media campaigns and reporting to the executives, I had to create a PowerPoint template and then manually make several Excel calculations in order to fill in the report. The report did serve a purpose but I was never truly happy with my design skills and I did have to spend a full day to put everything together. Locowise changes this whole process, saves me time and creates more beautiful reports than I could ever do myself. Here is how:

Reporting Options
  • Consistency. Locowise provides you with a standardised format of labels, dates, charts and more. The whole look and feel is standardised and consistent. This is done across the different pages and even across the different social media platforms.
  • User-friendly design. Locowise provides images and charts that are simple to understand, quick to scan and have a great visual impact. Perfect for executives who might not have the time nor the experience to understand a lot of social media jargon and data.
  • Automated data gathering and file creation. No more time wasted working in Excel or PowerPoint. You no longer need to manually download the raw data files, do Excel calculations and create PowerPoint reports. You can create your custom report charts and automatically export the final report into a PDF or a PowerPoint format, with Locowise doing all the work.
  • Automated sending of the report. You can go as far as having Locowise automatically not only create the report but also send it on the agreed date to the agreed recipients. It’s fine doing this within the social media team where everyone is an expert, but I actually don’t recommend doing this with the executives too. As explained above, for executives it is best to manually review the performance of the month and provide some “executive summary” insights. Following on from that you should provide a preview of the next month alongside the automated report.

That’s it. You are now ready to have that discussion with your management, get the first social media report sent out and start getting the recognition that the social media team deserves within the business.

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